Lawson on TV

There are two kinds of material that television drama has traditionally found it hardest to adapt to: stage plays and gay plays. So Angels in America - a US television version of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer and Tony prize-winning Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes - was always going to deserve an award for ambition. In fact, as the recent Golden Globe ceremony recognised, it also merits awards for acting, writing and production.

As a six-hour stage play, Angels in America - which follows six main characters through five years at the time when Reaganism and Aids were in the ascendant - was mainly admired, apart from its frankness about sexual and national politics, for its non-naturalistic theatricality. An Aids patient enjoys visions of an angel bursting through his roof; two of the characters meet only in a mutual hallucination. But scale and fantasy impress more easily in the theatre, where the excitement arises from their realisation in a confined space before our eyes. Could television, where editing and other technology make it almost easier to break the frame than to maintain it, achieve the same thrill?

In attempting the transition, HBO - America's most daring television producers - started with two advantages. The director allocated to Kushner's own screenplay was Mike Nichols, whose credits include the successful translation from stage to screen of another incendiary, non-naturalistic play: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? HBO has also underwritten Nichols with a movie-style budget ($65m/£36m), which, in turn, permits Hollywood casting: Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson.

Nichols begins his six hours of television with a wink to both the theatrical roots and the non-naturalistic mood. Streep, later to play a Mormon mother, is first seen in a startling piece of cross-casting as a heavily bearded rabbi. She is conducting the New York funeral of the grandmother of Louis, a young man attending with a friend who is not acknowledged to his family as his gay partner, Prior. It is Prior, recently diagnosed with Aids, who hallucinates the angel, whose impending arrival is announced, in a typical piece of Kushner cheekiness, by the presence of an erection.

Louis, unable to tolerate the illness of his lover, befriends Joe, another Brooklyn lawyer, who is joined in a strict Mormon marriage to Harper, although both of the couple suspect that he is gay, which has left her sex-starved and dependent on tranquillisers. Joe works for Roy Kohn, a charismatic but unethical attorney, played by Al Pacino as an epigrammatic savage. Kohn is being killed by Aids but bullies his doctor into pretending that he has liver cancer.

Over the vast canvas of his narrative, Kushner crosses the paths of his characters, so that Meryl Streep, as Joe's mom, ends up caring for the dying Prior. "This is my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother," Joe explains in a line characteristic of the snappy dialogue, to which Emma Thompson, as a nurse, responds: "Even in New York, that's strange."

The gradual interaction of initially scattered characters is a technique most associated with Victorian fiction and television soap opera, and it's the latter connection that explains why Angels in America takes so well to television. The resemblances between Kushner's domestic melodramas and Armistead Maupin's gay soap opera Tales From the City are much more apparent - and beneficial - than they were on stage.

And the non-realistic sequences startle even more than they did in the theatre because, except for Dennis Potter and now Paul Abbott, most dramatists are content to use the TV screen as a mirror of the streets. Whereas the stage has a long tradition of a hearth rug suddenly doing service as a magic carpet, there's still a real shock on the box when a wife, after a row with her husband, walks into a kitchen that is suddenly full of snow, and is guided to a fantasy world through a fridge, which has now become a CS Lewis wardrobe, by an airline steward in a fur-lined anorak.

Nichols' direction is sometimes specific to television: intercutting, for example, marital spats between Prior and Louis and Harper and Joe, and also using the swallowing of pills - Harper's Valium, Prior's cocktail of capsules against HIV - to segue scenes. The pacing, though, is theatrical, never flinching from 10- or 15-minute scenes. The rhythms and riffs of the dialogue are also unlike most of what is written directly for the small screen. Kushner, although a sharp mimic of daily conversation, has a poetic ear and has even written plays in verse. Here, in Angels in America, is Roy Kohn responding to a junior who has refused to make a move on ethical grounds: "This is gastric juices, churning. This is acids and enzymes. This is intestinal is what this is. This is bowel movements and red, red meat. This, this, this is politics, Joe." You can feel Pacino's actor's gastric juices churning as he eats this speech.

Most literature is diminished by visualisation: about 20% of the brilliance of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain survives in the movie. Unusually, Angels in America manages to be a thrilling and gripping piece of television (currently rivalled only by Shameless, also showing on Channel 4), which also reminds us that Kushner wrote one of the great American plays.

· Angels in America, February 7 & 8, 9pm, Channel 4

I'll name that show in one

Although our grandmothers always warned against judging a book by its cover, a comparison of television schedules from the past and the present proves that you can tell more and more about a television programme by its title.

Take The Bunker: Crisis Command - Could You Run the Country?, a new BBC2 project in which, as you can already tell from those nine words printed in the Radio Times, contestants get a try at being prime minister during a red alert.

Ten years ago, the show would probably have been called simply The Bunker - teasingly intriguing for the general audience with the additional possibility that some Hitler obsessives might tune in by mistake. Five years ago, it might have been The Bunker: Crisis Command. Now, though, the title is less a label than a full synopsis.

This trend in titles towards naked disclosure rather than striptease is also represented this week by Cancer Cures: Who Can You Trust?, Jeremy Clarkson's Inventions That Changed the World, How Mad Was King George? - Timewatch and last night's Alistair McGowan Goes Wild With Rhinos, all of which obey the dominant media cliche of our times: the one about doing what it says on the tin.

This greater explicitness is not accidental but is a response to the digital multi-channel viewing environment, in which long-term monogamy with a channel or a series been replaced by one-night stands and quickies with whichever of the many tricks on offer looks most exciting. The title is the red light they burn in their window.

This practice began on digital-only channels, where a programme is far more likely to be called Clive Anderson Talks to Andrew Davies than, say, Arts Talk, as would have been the case in the past. In fact, you can now spot one of the senior series by the presence of a generic-tease title such as Horizon or The South Bank Show or Timewatch.

The vaguer brand-names still exist - most recently, BBC1's Imagine - but, as digital viewing becomes default, it's the content of individual shows that will be sold: The Women Picasso Shagged - Imagine or JK Rowling Talks to Melvyn Bragg - The South Bank Show. Not only must shows say on the tin what they do but the tin will increasingly be rattled.

· The Bunker: Crisis Command - Could You Run the Country?, Tuesday, 9pm, BBC2; How Mad Was King George? - Timewatch, Friday, 9pm, BBC2